Common Turkic Alphabet

- updated 2017/11/20 10:04

Read offline

The terms Common Turkic Alphabet or Pan-Turkic Alphabet refer to two different systems using the Latin alphabet to write various Turkic languages. The old system was developed in the Soviet Union and used in the 1930s; the current system is an alphabet with 34 letters recognized by the Turkic Council.[1] Its letters are as follows:

Long forms of vowels are shown with a circumflex (in Turkish): Â, Ê, Î, Ô, Û.

Grapheme-phoneme correspondences

The orthographies of Turkic languages are largely phonetic, meaning that the pronunciation of a word can usually be determined from its spelling. For example, unlike English, Turkish orthography is highly regular and a word's pronunciation can almost always be determined by its spelling. This rule excludes recent loanwords such as proper names. The letters representing vowel sounds in Turkic languages are, in alphabetical order, ⟨a⟩, ⟨ä⟩ and ⟨e⟩, ⟨ı⟩, ⟨i⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨ö⟩, ⟨u⟩, ⟨ü⟩.[2]

Primary graphemes of Turkic languages in alphabets based on the modern Common Turkic Alphabet (CTA)

The Latin letter Ë (E-umlaut) has no relation to the Cyrillic letter Ё (Yo). The Latin letter Ë represents the sound sequence /je/ and thus corresponds to the Cyrillic letter Є in Ukrainian or Е in Russian.

The Cyrillic Ѕ, Љ, and Њ all originate in the Macedonian alphabet (with the latter two being also in Serbian) and represent the same phonemes as in the CTA.

In the USSR

The Uniform Turkic Alphabet was a Latin alphabet used by non-Slavic peoples of the USSR in the 1930s. The alphabet used letters from Jaꞑalif as it was also a part of the uniform alphabet. The uniform alphabet utilized Latin letters, excluding "w". Some additional letters were also introduced into the alphabet.